Moonlight
by JoeMerl
Summary: Toph sort of hates the moon, if only because she has no idea what the heck it is. One-shot, one-sided Toph/Sokka and past Sokka/Yue. Written for Tokka Week.


**Author's Notes:** Well, it's Tokka Week over on Deviantart (again, not sure how that works here, but whatever), so here's my one-shot for the prompt "Moonlight." (It was also partially inspired by a pic called "Toph" by someone named AlicePike, by the way: joemerl. deviantart. com/favourites/#/d2uyebk ) Hope you enjoy.

* * *

Sokka sighed wistfully, leaning back to stare quietly at the starry night sky above him.

Toph rolled her eyes, leaning back against a boulder with her arms crossed over her chest.

"What's the problem, Wheezy?"

"Huh?" Sokka said, startled from his thoughts as he turned around to face her.

Toph had to resist the urge to roll her eyes again. "That's like the third time you go _aahhh_" she gave a long, exaggerated sigh "in the last ten minutes. Keep blowing that much air and you're gonna give _Aang _a run for his money."

Now it was Sokka's turn to roll his eyes, or she thought he did anyway, such subtle facial expressions were always a bit harder to read. She _was_ sure she felt him stiffen defensively, though, and is heartbeat altered very slightly to match his sheepish tone.

"I was just...you know, looking at the sky," he muttered, turning away and craning his neck again. "The moon is full tonight," he added, in a slightly softer voice.

Toph leaned back and turned her sightless eyes up to the darkness above her. Around her she felt a vast plain of rocky ground, hundreds of stones and pebbles and a few scraggly trees, all of which had insects scurrying on or inside them. Over the nearest ridge she could sense their campgrounds; Katara seemed to be puttering around with the fire, while Aang was sitting back and probably talking up a storm, since she could feel his arms gesturing wildly. About twenty feet to her left was an anthill filled with hundreds or thousands of moving little creatures, while almost directly below her she felt a weaselrat family's den with a half-dozen tunnels going off in different directions. The mother and one of the babies seemed to be awake, while the other three were all sleeping.

Up above her she felt nothing, saw nothing, sensed nothing. Above her head was a blank void, cold night air without any activity or meaning.

"Yeah, it sure is pretty," she said in a completely deadpan tone.

Sokka smiled. "Yeah, isn't—...oh." He looked away again, his happy expression melting into a sullen frown. "Ha, ha. Very funny."

"Oh, lighten up."

He grunted. Toph frowned slightly, but quickly corrected it.

"Oh, what? Is this about that ex-girlfriend of yours who turned into a fish or something?"

"_She did not turn into a fish!_"

"That's the way I heard it."

"Well, you heard it wrong, so be quiet!" Sokka snapped, turning to her in what she assumed was a glare. His arms and legs had only stiffened further, and now his heart was hammering at an angry speed. Some dim, rational part of Toph's mind realized these were signs she should drop it, call off her attack, but some other, stupider part—not a playful, teasing part, either, but a sort of annoyed, confused and bitter part—pressed her to proceed.

"Well, excuse _me,_ lover boy. I didn't realize how _moony_ you were over a dumb little ball of light."

As soon as the words were out her mouth Toph knew that she had gone too far—the angry sputtering that came out of Sokka's mouth might have been funny to someone who couldn't feel the absolute _rage_ that was emanating through his heartbeat or feel his fingers ball into fists.

"Well, you know what, Toph? ! Maybe you should just—just—_aw, forget it!_"

He got up and stormed away, climbing over the ridge and back into camp. Toph was able to observe him the entire way, felt as he angrily kicked a pebble in his way, felt it land a few feet away from him, and felt Aang and Katara's confused reactions as he stomped right past them and threw himself into his tent without speaking.

Toph sat frozen for a moment, still able to dimly feel Sokka as he fidgeted angrily some fifty feet away.

Well, _that_ had been a bad move, hadn't it?

Toph sighed this time and turned back towards the sky, trying to shift her focus from the expansive and fascinating earth below her to the dim, blank nothingness that existed above. Gentle moonlight upon the small girl, casting her face and the surrounding area in a soft, silvery glow, but she had no sense of it, she was as dumb to the subtle beauty around her as Sokka had been to the ants or the weaselrats.

The moon was nothing to her, literally. It was just a word, an empty, meaningless term that other people talked about but she could never see. How could you even describe it to her? Well, it was a ball of light. What's light, exactly? She had never seen light, had no real idea what it meant. It was silver. But what was color? Just an aspect of light. Toph knew "silver" as a metal, but it didn't feel much different in her hands than gold or copper or anything else. Was the moon metallic, then? No, or at least, nobody knew for sure; things could be "silver" without being "silver," apparently, whatever that meant.

Daytime terms were better for Toph. She had never seen the sunlight either, but at least she could _feel _it, she knew it as that warm feeling that spread over her skin and greeted her out her window when she woke up every morning back in Gaoling. Since the night was cold, she had long assumed that the moon was just the opposite, the source of night's coldness, but no, her mother had once told her once, because it was just as cold when the moon was absent (apparently it disappeared some days of the month...or something). Plus there were these things called "stars," but she didn't know anything about them, either, they were like little moons but smaller and sometimes brighter. and apparently all these things were just _wonderful_ to look at, she was told, there were poems and songs and paintings based around them, but to her they were nothing, just complicated and overused words to describe the same old blankness above her. To her "up" just meant "empty," unless somebody was Bending a boulder or something for her to sense. Even now that she had flown on Appa these "sky" terms were still nebulous (why did people say clouds were "fluffy" when they were clearly just misty and _wet?_)

Toph stared up at that nothingness for a while, wondering if there was _any _way to sense this "moon" thing, to understand what it was that made Sokka so ga-ga. Not that she really needed to _see_ it to understand, of course...it wasn't really a lack of sight that made her feel so bitter, deep down.

"You're some stiff competition, I'll give you that, toots," Toph muttered, dropping her head to her hand and wondering if she was even facing the source of her envy. Then she sighed, climbing to her feet and slowly dragging herself across the wonderfully sensible ground back to camp, her intangible competitor watching silently as she went.


End file.
